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Exposure Ops on a Budget

Utilizing ‘guerilla’ marketing tactics to add to your bottom line

By Lisa Harbatkin

Tradition hasn’t been what it used to be since the concept of guerilla marketing and the computer era got underway at pretty much the same time.

That’s as true for wood industry companies as it is for gizmo makers and rock groups, and as true for B-to-B as it is for B-to-C.

Basically, guerilla marketing uses non-traditional, unconventional approaches and tactics. They might range from e-mail newsletters and YouTube to high-profile special events. Marketing execs and experts don’t necessarily agree on definitions, details and tactics.
But they do agree that whatever the tactics, it’s getting harder to out-buzz your competition against the background noise of an increasingly crowded, global and confusing marketplace.

“You have to do more today than manufacture more efficiently. That will never be enough,” says Robert Bush, a professor at the Center for Forest Products Marketing & Management at Virginia Tech’s Department of Wood Science and Forest Products. “You have to develop the marketing expertise. You have to look for competitive advantage not only in manufacturing, but in how you market your products.”

So, marketing specialists say, blending the more in-your-face and techie tactics of guerilla marketing with traditional approaches makes sense in designing marketing plans in today’s buzzy world.

“The media and new technologies are what really drive change,” says Audra Hession, vice president of New York-based international Gibbs & Soell Public Relations.
These tech-based approaches, central to definitions of guerilla marketing, are especially useful for smaller companies, suggests Neil Hair, assistant professor of marketing at the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, N.Y.

“Guerilla marketing is essentially marketing for people who don’t have a lot of money to spend on traditional techniques,” Hair says. Relationship marketing, electronic communities like blogs and forums and viral, or buzz, marketing are typical guerilla techniques.

Guerilla tactics are especially useful for smaller and mid-size companies with less cash to spend. But major corporations are finding them just as useful for reaching consumers tuned into the media age.

Jay Conrad Levinson is generally credited with coining the term guerilla marketing a quarter-century ago. He continues to update and redefine the concept in speeches, seminars, books, articles — and on the Web.

Of course, it could be argued that the Web itself is now too traditional to be guerilla. Many early “guerilla” tactics have become SOP over the last 25 years.

Depending on how you use them, maybe even computers are all but passé in an era of iPods, Blackberries, enhanced cell phones, and the next big communication device now escaping from the industrial development departments of the high-tech manufacturers.

CONSUMER CONCERNS
High-tech capabilities provide the communications platforms for guerilla marketing. But this media mania is also a problem.

“These approaches are great at creating awareness,” Hession says of tech-based and other buzz-creation tactics like special events and product give-aways. “But we’re getting these messages everywhere we turn. If they’re not done well, consumers may tune them out.”

A solid campaign will support its guerilla or non-traditional tactics with a combination of other more traditional marketing tactics and media, such as news releases about new products or services and advertising.

“Public relations adds credibility because someone else is writing about it,” Hession says.

Similarly, viral, or buzz-generated, approaches aim to use word-of-mouth to get other people talking about your company, Hair says.

Guerilla and otherwise, Hair says, marketing “is all about customer service and about enhancing the customer experience. You have to do more than market your products. You’ve got to be able to market yourself and your company. People don’t trust companies. They trust people.”

Back home in England, Hair worked with the managing director of Robert Sorby, a UK manufacturer of turnings tools. The MD invested an hour a day joining in Internet news groups and forums. He learned participants’ interests and offered pointers on techniques, equipment maintenance and the like — other brands as well as his own. That one hour each morning helped Sorby build an impressive export market — and an impressive market for secondary products like T-shirts and aprons with the company logo. “That to me is guerilla marketing,” says Hair. Before logging on to the forums, the MD “had no idea there was a cult market for his products.”

Gibbs & Soell handles public relations for many building products manufacturers, including American Woodmark and Craftmaster Doors. It uses a variety of approaches with its clients.

“Our I-Power program is aimed at getting clients to think out of the box, to think about how they differ from their competition, and how to break through the clutter to reach their customers,” says Hession. “You do that by understanding your customer.”

The process starts with market research and a good database and works through creation and implementation of a carefully planned campaign that combines traditional and guerilla techniques.

“We all have the same objectives, and we all have access to the same tools,” Hession says. “The best programs take an integrated approach that utilizes a combination of marketing tools.”

Whatever tactics you use, Hession says, the important thing “is knowing when and how to apply them. You’re trying to get access to that consumer at multiple touch points.”

STARTING WITH THE PRODUCT
“Lumber companies have no reason to be close to anyone but the middleman,” Bush says. “But even lumber companies have to be more aware of the channel and what the end product is.”

So, a primary manufacturer’s marketing program can start with the product itself — and using various means to get out the news. The wood industry may be an older one, Bush says, but it’s still one where people come up with a lot of new ideas.
A board supplier can offer structural lumber in more than 8-ft. lengths, he says. “There are opportunities there, and that’s where we look for innovation. There are even bigger opportunities on the distribution side, in how you get to the consumer,” says Bush.

Cabinetmakers, he says, may want to think of ways to get their products into a wider range of retailers, and a small cabinet company may want to think of new ways for consumers to use its products. “They know they can’t reach the whole market, but they can use these tactics to focus in on their niche,” Bush says.

Consumers are buying more foreign species like Brazilian cherry and Malaysian oak in the current market. “The demand is being reflected back through the channel,” Bush says.

That’s part of the market research lumber suppliers should be doing — keeping track of what their secondary product customers tell them is selling. Those end consumers, for their part, may want to research what they may be getting in these less familiar woods.

“Target the technology to what’s logical for the product,” Hession says. People invest considerable time and money in buying furniture, cabinets and in the remodeling process and thinking about what goes into these and many other wood product purchases.

The Internet makes sense for these products. People will use company web sites to do the research, Hession says. “It lets you provide information in a format that works for them, for the research they’re doing.” Mobile devices work for advertising, and for messages about less research-intensive products and services.

INTERNETTING FOR INFO
The Internet similarly makes technical product information readily available to trade customers such as architectural woodworkers and other secondary manufacturers as they look for the materials and systems they need to make their products.

Inescapable as it is, the Internet is a good market research resource for manufacturers and a good shopping research tool for consumers.
“Consumers do their research. They’re likely to walk in and say ‘I want these cabinets.’ Why? ‘Because I did my research,’” Bush says.

But the Net and the various and constantly multiplying mobile communications formats do have their downside, perhaps especially when it comes to reaching that much-in-demand end-use customer. That centers on the problems inherent in filtering out good information from unreliable clutter.

“You have to think of the Internet as a communications tool. It’s not directly a sales tool,” Bush says. “The sales will come, but first you need the communication.”

CREDIBILITY IS CENTRAL.
“It has to be about integrity and honesty. It can’t be about the hard sell. Consumers get turned off by that approach. It has to be genuine,” Hair says. That goes for everything from blogs and forums to major ad campaigns.

“While consumers use various forms of the media to gather information, they are more cautious today about trusting just one source due to recent news stories about ethical journalism practices and corporate fraud,” Hession says.

“That’s another reason why successful marketing campaigns involve an integrated approach and recognize that different media formats are powerful tools in managing and influencing public perceptions.”